Editorial reviews

In addition to being an exhaustive and gimlet-eyed social history of modern Atlanta, especially its flawed criminal justice system and law-enforcement agencies, “Criminal” is the kind of hold-on-to-your-hat, nail-biting story Slaughter has become world-famous for.

However successful you find the dizzying alternation between present and past nightmares, this double-barreled load of horrors is the clearest indication yet that Slaughter, like the sage of Yoknapatawpha, is less concerned with the shape of individual novels than with her sprawling, multivolume saga as a whole.